Bob Dylan & the Band: I Shall Be Released
(recorded summer 1967)
Bob Dylan (with Happy Traum): I Shall Be Released
(Columbia Recording Studios, NYC, 9-24-71)
Bob Dylan (with Happy Traum): You Ain't Going Nowhere
(Columbia Recording Studios, NYC, 9-24-71)
A sense of trade and collaboration elevates every performance on The Basement Tapes, but the authorship behind some of the songs is obvious. “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” is pure Bob Dylan, while “Katie’s Been Gone” is pure Richard Manuel. Neither of them needed the other to write those songs. “I Shall Be Released” is extraordinary because neither Dylan nor Manuel could have done it alone. It’s the sum of each musician’s strengths, and the 1967 Basement recording is the only performance in which they have an equal say.
It’s impossible to know for sure who wrote what on “I Shall Be Released.” The last verse (“Yonder stands a man in this lonely crowd / A man who swears he’s not to blame”) could come from no one but Dylan but the song as a whole is molded in Manuel’s spirit. Of course, there is the band—their drumless murmur moves forward like a makeshift raft on the Mississippi river and makes every subsequent rendition seem overthought. But the singing is the main story. Dylan uses a voice on the 1967 performance that he’s never used on any other song in his career. He’s doing Manuel—an attempt at naked soul music, arguably his first. As a musician trying to recover from years of self-consciousness and social unease (culminating in the disastrous 1966 tour of England, and the cataclysmic motorcycle accident that followed it), Dylan must have been encouraged by Manuel, who was able to drop his guard to the ground every time he stepped up to sing. To understand their connection just listen to the way Manuel’s falsetto shadows Dylan on every chorus, more spectral reflection than traditional harmony.
Despite his unmistakable imprint, “I Shall Be Released” is rarely regarded as a Richard Manuel song. His invisibility is plainly told in this congratulatory singalong, in which Martin Scorsese’s fleet of cameras manages to get a close-up of all 13 people onstage, except for the man singing the song. I don’t think Dylan had much to do with writing Richard out of history, although he did try to repossesses the song for himself in 1971. Working with Happy Traum, a chum from the Gerde’s Folk City days, Dylan recorded versions of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” and “I Shall Be Released” for inclusion on his Greatest Hits Vol. II—his way of nudging an audience still largely under the assumption that those songs were written by The Byrds and The Band. The frayed dirge of 1967 is here replaced with a spry but understated swing. Now Dylan is the confident rock star, miles from the Woodstock idyll. This is how Ronnie Lane and Ronnie Wood might play it—two friends with acoustics approximating a hotel room jam in the roomy Columbia studio.
They also reminisced on the Basement with “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” its revised opening proof that Dylan was not too grown-up to be goofy:
Clouds so swift, the rain falling in
Going to see a movie called Gunga Din
Pack up your money, pull up your tent McGuinn
You ain’t going nowhere
